I thought removing people from my travel photos would be a breeze

Spending my weekend trying to play professional editor

I was looking at some photos I took during a trip to Jeju Island last month. There were a few shots where I really liked the lighting and how I looked, but there was this random tourist standing just a few inches behind me in almost every frame. It is frustrating because I paid about 15,000 won for a tripod and a Bluetooth remote to make sure I could take photos without asking strangers, but the crowded spots made it impossible. I decided to spend my Saturday afternoon trying to ‘clean up’ these images using various AI tools I’d been hearing about. I started with a basic online Photoshop web app, thinking it would be as simple as clicking a ‘remove’ button, but it wasn’t that straightforward.

The struggle with messy background textures

The first tool I tried felt like it was doing a decent job until I zoomed in to check the edges. The space where the person used to be just looked like a blurry, smudged mess. It’s like the AI couldn’t figure out what the volcanic rocks in the background were supposed to look like once the obstruction was gone. I spent probably two hours just toggling between different selection brushes. It felt a bit like performing surgery on a pixelated patient. If I compare this to the results I saw on a friend’s Galaxy Z Fold 8, which has that built-in ‘Object Eraser’ feature, I feel like I might have been overcomplicating things by trying to do it all manually on a laptop. Maybe the software on the phone is just better at analyzing local textures.

Why I gave up on perfection

By the third hour, I started noticing things that didn’t matter before. The shadows were casting in the wrong direction, or the horizon line looked slightly bent where the editing happened. It hit me that I was obsessing over making the photo look like a studio-quality shot when it was really just a memory from a vacation. I remember reading somewhere about how people in the industry prioritize ‘removing the forced feeling’ in images, and I think that’s exactly what I lost. My edited photos started looking like they belonged in a weirdly curated catalog rather than my own photo album. The more I tried to make it look real, the less real it actually felt.

Dealing with the leftovers of the process

I eventually gave up on a few of the shots entirely. I still have the original files, which are objectively ‘cluttered’ but at least honest. There is something annoying about having a folder full of half-finished projects. I still have that one photo where I successfully deleted the person, but the grass under their feet looks like a giant, undefined green smear. I could probably spend another two hours on it, but I’m just tired. I think I’ve reached my limit for staring at the same pixels.

The cost of trying to rewrite the scene

There is this lingering thought that maybe I should have just walked a bit further or waited for the crowd to thin out at the site. Instead, I spent my time paying for a subscription to a photo service for a month, which cost me around 20,000 won, just to fix photos that I’ll likely only look at once or twice more. Is it worth the effort? I’m not sure. Sometimes the process of fixing the image takes so much time that the actual feeling of the moment gets replaced by the frustration of the editing process itself. I might just start leaving the strangers in the photos and call it ‘authentic’ from now on.